The 'Golden Spike' of Oct. 16, 1881 connected the Peninsula to the world

By Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 757-247-4783

The C&O Railroad Terminus at Newport News

Handout

A decade after the C&O Railroad completed its Peninsula line in 1881, its eastern terminus at Newport News was a bustling hub of train tracks, grain elevators, coal yards, piers and shipbuilding yards.

A decade after the C&O Railroad completed its Peninsula line in 1881, its eastern terminus at Newport News was a bustling hub of train tracks, grain elevators, coal yards, piers and shipbuilding yards. (Handout)

Before the driving of the golden spike that marked the Oct. 16, 1881 completion of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad between Newport News and Richmond, the only way to travel to the Peninsula was by often impassable roads or slow-moving boats on the water.

But within days of hammering the last spike home, the gangs of men who'd labored on the crucial track for much of the year had opened the region to the rest of the world in a new and unprecedented fashion.

Scores of local dignitaries took the first train that left Newport News on Oct. 19 and traveled northwest to attend the pageantry at the centennial celebration of the British Revolutionary War surrender at Yorktown. And when the line opened for regular service in 1882, the constant shipments of coal and grain from the west to the burgeoning docks at Newport News transformed the culture and character of the region.

Four years after the trains started running, C&O President Collis P. Huntington chartered his soon-to-be famous shipyard, too, making still more indelible the giant mark he left on the economy and identity of the Peninsula.

Newport News was the primary beneficiary of this sudden concentration of rail lines, grain elevators, coal yards, piers and dry docks, but so great an engine of jobs did these new industries become that the effect spread to Warwick County and Hampton.

More changes rippled out into the countryside from the new ability to ship crops and obtain goods through the many railroad depots that rose up in a series stretching from Gum Grove and Lee Hall In Warwick County to Norge and Toano in James City County.

Certainly, the many steamboat lines that called at Old Point Comfort and Newport News as well as smaller wharves all up and down the James and York rivers had helped fuel the region's commerce for decades.

The oyster and crab barons of Hampton, in particular, used to the Old Bay Line and other companies to ship their goods to far-away customers up and the Eastern Seaboard.

But not for nothing did such wealthy seafood magnates as J.S. Darling join the owners of the great waterfront resorts at Old Point Comfort to lobby Huntington and the C&O for a quick extension of the track from Newport News to the Old Point Comfort wharves.

They knew the new marker erected there to pinpoint Mile Zero and the eastern terminus of the C&O was the signpost of a revolution.

Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad baron Collis P. Huntington gave the Peninsula its first rail connection to the rest of the world on Oct. 16, 1881, ushering in revolutionary changes to the region's economy and culture.

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